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Section: Arts & Letters

Twenty-First Century Holiday
By Ron Ehmke

BILLIE HOLIDAY
The Ultimate Collection
(Hip-O/Verve/Decca/Universal)

It’s impossible to talk about popular music without taking technology (and, by extension, economics) into account. For most of the twentieth century, for instance, the average pop standard clocked in at around three minutes because that was the length accommodated by wax cylinders — and, after them, 78s and 45s. Long-playing albums gave rise to the phenomenon of interconnected sequences of songs, a trend pioneered by Sinatra and perfected by the Beach Boys, the Beatles, Dylan and a whole bunch of long-haired progressive rockers with a taste for ever-more-drawn-out drum and guitar solos.

At the end of the vinyl era came the phenomenon of boxed sets: mammoth career retrospectives of artists and labels spanning anywhere from three up to 20 or more albums apiece. Loaded with outtakes and created with serious collectors in mind, these marvels seemed to belong in a bookcase—or even a display case—rather than on the record shelf. With the advent of compact discs, the box comes into its full, overstuffed glory.
This raises a problem in the case of certain larger-than-life artists, like Billie Holiday. In recent years, fans of Lady Day have been forced to choose between skimpy single-disc hits collections (most of them drawn from only one of the nine labels for which she recorded) and jaw-dropping/wallet-busting behemoths like a ten-disc compilation of her Columbia sessions with a list price of $170.

Enter Billie Holiday: The Ultimate Collection, a joint venture of Hip-O, Verve and Decca Records, all of them safely nestled under the umbrella of the Universal Music Group (three cheers for corporate megamergers!). I don’t mean to nitpick, but I’m not sure “ultimate” is the right term for this package. That particular adjective conjures up images of over-the-top excess (see above), when the actual appeal of this set is its concision: on a pair of hour-plus CDs, you get one sterling production each of the major songs Holiday made her own. Yes, “God Bless the Child,” “Lady Sings the Blues” and “Strange Fruit” are all here, of course, alongside classics by Mercer, Arlen, the Gershwins and countless other twentieth century giants. Given that Holiday was famed for never performing a song exactly the same way twice, I prefer to think of these not as “definitive” versions, but I trust compilation producer Andy McKaie’s selections.

The collection’s two audio CDs contain no alternate takes that should have remained locked in the vaults, no filler, just one stunning standard after another, arranged in chronological order so you can hear the vocalist’s evolution from the girl singer in Teddy Wilson’s mid-thirties swing band to the mature blues/jazz icon cherished the world over. The collection winds up with a smattering of tracks from the Verve years, by which point Holiday’s hard living had taken its toll on her vocal chords (leading to some of the most haunting performances of her career) and one selection from her final, controversial excursion into string-laden pop for Columbia, Lady in Satin.

But the 42 songs here, masterfully assembled though they may be, are only part of what makes Ultimate such a treasure. The third disc in the trade-paperback-sized package is a DVD containing film clips (including two numbers from the 1947 film New Orleans and three fascinating excerpts from a 1957 ABC TV show), concert recordings, a band rehearsal session and an interview conducted by Mike Wallace. These rarities may not be essential in the same way as the music, but they’re fascinating all the same. Much of the DVD material was drawn from the archives of Holiday biographer Linda Kuehl, who committed suicide in 1979 before completing a projected book on the singer. Audio interviews with band members, a vast photo archive, a lengthy discography, and an illustrated timeline all help to flesh out Holiday as a living, breathing person from a specific moment in history, and Ultimate takes an encyclopedic approach to her life and work in a way that would not have been possible only a couple of decades ago.

The bonus features manage to be the package’s strongest and weakest components at the same time. On the one hand, it’s incredible to have this much background information (along with Ashley Kahn’s detailed liner notes) at your fingertips; on the other hand, the digital elements don’t make full use of their medium’s potential for creative cross-referencing, so you have to click through one page of material at a time (with a fraction of the flexibility a conventional book would provide), unable to jump ahead or search for a key term or player. What’s the point of offering such phenomenal resources if users can’t access them conveniently?

No matter. The Ultimate Collection is a godsend for music lovers who want to do more than get their feet wet but do less than dive into the deep end of Holiday studies. It’s affordable enough (at $40) to make its way into most home collections, and its elegant design makes it a perfect gift as well. In its combination of audio, video and text, it also points the way toward a uniquely twenty-first century art form.


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